US customs and border protection is flying a surveillance drone over Minneapolis

Re:US customs and border protection is flying a surveillance... by TallGuyShort on Friday May 29, 2020 @03:07PM (#23354216)

Preserving the rule of law is one of the most fundamental reasons for government to even exist. It's predicated upon the idea that sometimes people break the law, and it's better for there to be due process administered by a judicial system than for there to be anarchy. If this is going to become a people vs. the government type issue, where the government isn't expected to be any better than looters, then the looters just got even more of my sympathy than they had before.

If the government is allowed to throw out the law at this point because people are rioting in response to delayed charges against a police killing caught on video, why did the government even have to exist in the first place?

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Re:US customs and border protection is flying a surveillance... by ikeyany on Friday May 29, 2020 @06:24PM (#23356271)

The rule of law must be preserved when it comes to property damage, but it must also be preserved when it comes to murdering black men.

In addition, saying that people are rioting because of only one isolated incident is not true and reductionist. There is a history of law enforcement treating black people's lives as unimportant.

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Re:US customs and border protection is flying a surveillance... by TallGuyShort on Friday May 29, 2020 @06:28PM (#23356306)

Yeah just to be clear I completely agree with both of those points. But that's only adding even more reasons why it's completely unacceptable for the riot response here to be anything but completely law-abiding. The police already have no moral high ground here IMO.

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Re:US customs and border protection is flying a surveillance... by ikeyany on Friday May 29, 2020 @06:57PM (#23356573)

Why would you expect people to protest peacefully anymore? This was tried for years. Remember Colin Kapernick and kneeling?

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Re:US customs and border protection is flying a surveillance... by TallGuyShort on Friday May 29, 2020 @07:10PM (#23356666)

I'm not sure what part of my post you're responding to, but I don't expect people to protest peacefully anymore. I fully support Kapernick and think criticism of him was ignorant and wrong.

Maybe "riot response" is an ambiguous term, but I'm saying the response to the riot has to be completely legal, responding to a parent poster who was saying that it's okay for police the break the law in their response, which I strongly disagree with.

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Re:US customs and border protection is flying a surveillance... by A4ET8a8uTh0 on Friday May 29, 2020 @05:11PM (#23355607)

Agreed in general. In real life it can quickly become quite messy. For example, I have zero issues with HK rioting after all other venues are exhausted. It is difficult for me to argue that HK is magically different from the rest of the world. I do not advocate violence, but I understand the instinct to inflict pain after pain is inflicted upon you. The sooner we understand that, the sooner we can make it a little less bad place to live in.

That said, rioters here seem more like opportunists than protesters..

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Re:US customs and border protection is flying a surveillance... by TallGuyShort on Friday May 29, 2020 @05:14PM (#23355642)

And there's definitely some shady stuff going on with the videos of the person who broke windows at AutoZone.

Unfortunately, I think the police department's handling of this has only encouraged rioting. I would give them the benefit of the doubt if the officer was suspended pending an investigation or review. But he was fired. That's a mountain of paperwork and HR involvement - so they were probably pretty certain they couldn't defend what he did. But they didn't arrest him, which I'm pretty is less of a bureaucratic headache, until after the rioting.

Maybe someone can give a plausible and reasonable explanation for that sequence of events, but from where I'm sitting this just screams "rioting got our attention".

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